Al-Jazeera's
award-winning Australian correspondent Peter Greste is in a defendants
cage in the Police
Academy courthouse during a trial on alleged terror
charges in Cairo, Egypt, on May 3, 2014. (AP Photo/Hamada Elrasam,)
JERUSALEM—In the Arab world, being a journalist can be enough to get you thrown in jail. Just ask the staff of the progressive news website Yanair in Cairo. Two of the website’s editors, Amr Badr and Mahmoud al-Sakka, were arrested on May 1. They were jailed and charged with “spreading false news, endangering national security, and organizing illegal protests.”
Such ludicrous charges would be laughable in most Western countries, but the Arab world has its own set of rules. Even the most capable and respected Arab journalists work under intense pressure and great personal risk.
In this case, the men were taken by about four dozen armed police who stormed the Cairo Journalist Syndicate office. Three board members of the Journalist Syndicate who were later also arrested after publishing news of the raid will stand trial on June 4. They are charged with “spreading false news.”
Deadly Dangerous
At the end of 2015, Egypt ranked second only to China for the number of jailed journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.“Authorities in Egypt are abandoning all restraint in their efforts to intimidate and silence the press,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour in a statement.
The situation in Egypt is not unique to the Arab world, which is made up of 22 countries and over 385 million people. The largest contingency of that population—over 85 million people—resides in Egypt. Members of the rest of the Arab world are spread out across places like Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank.
0 comments:
Post a Comment